Samsung accuses Apple of playing race card in closing arguments

There’s enough bad blood between Apple and Samsung without getting accusations of racism involved. Bloomberg reports that Samsung attorney Bill Price asked judge Lucy Koh for a mistrial on Tuesday after he accused Apple attorney Harold McElhinny of “appealing to race” in his closing arguments at the latest Apple-Samsung patent trial. Price was irked when McElhinny told the jury about his memories growing up seeing many American television companies lose out to foreign competitors because they didn’t protect their intellectual property. Price thought McElhinny’s story was a thinly veiled attempt to appeal to Americans’ nationalism and to compare Samsung with other Asian companies that made copycat TVs that put companies like Zenith into bankruptcy. McElhinny denied Price’s accusations and said that “I did not say a word about race, and I did not say Asian.”